Yellow Card
For the 2025 season, all umpire zones in the province are introducing a new sanction system to help track individuals whose behaviour is considered inappropriate. This system will allow any sanctions to be more evenly applied by different umpires. Tracking sanctions provincially, will allow softball authorities to tag and then deal with individuals that have recurring behavioural issues at any league game of tournament in the province.
According to surveys done by the National Association of Sports Officials (NASO) nearly 1/2 of all officials have “…felt unsafe or feared for [their] safety due to administrator, player, coach, or spectator behavior!
With such a statistic, it makes it extremely difficult to recruit, but more importantly, RETAIN umpires.
Presently when a misconduct occurs, the umpire really only has three options:
- Do nothing
- warn verbally
- Eject
The issue with “warn verbally” is that we are forcing our younger umpires to “deal with” adult coaches and/or spectators, which may be far out of their comfort zone. This new sanction system provides two distinct levels of discipline, giving umpires more options to deal with misconduct. Umpires will now have an established set of guidelines to determine what sanction should be applied for each misconduct. This may allow a participant in the game to have a minor misconduct indiscretion to remain in the game; which in the past might have resulted in an ejection. A major misconduct would still result in an ejection under this new system.
The intent is to provide all participants, coaches, players and umpires a clear and defined set of guidelines of types of misconduct and sanctions that may result. Examples of these misconducts are communicated to our umpires at our annual clinics.
Misconduct
What constitutes misconduct at each level of the new sanction system? Misconduct by a team towards umpires, opponents, teammates and spectators will be classified in two categories:
Minor Misconduct (a yellow card) – actions contrary to good manners, moral principles, or expressing contempt.
Major Misconduct (ejection) – actions of abuse, insults, threatening, foul language, aggression or a continued behaviour issue after having received a yellow card.
- The result of such sanction is the misconduct will be reported to Softball Alberta
- The offending individual will be allowed to continue to participate within the game.
- A second yellow card to an individual will result in immediate ejection without the second card being shown
to the offending individual. - A yellow card does not have to precede an ejection. If the misconduct is serious enough, the individual can
be ejected without receiving a yellow card.